Sunday, May 29, 2011

R.I.P. Gil Scott Heron

Gil Scott Heron just passed away-vocalist, poet, prophet- narrator of American Tragedies large and small. The pain hedocumented was inside him too, giving his work even greater power. No illusions and fictions, even those we used to keepgoing day to day, escapted his sharp eye and poetic imagination. He was there when Sixties dreams collapsed in the wakeof drug epidemmics, de-industrialization, benign neglect ( of the Black and poor) and rampant connsumerism. His vision was as onceglobal, and deeply intimate. He could write about the aches we have inside with the same eloquence he applied to the nation's devolutioninto cynicism.and material excess. Inside his musical universe, rage and irony coexised uneasily with tenderness and compassion and moments of startling beauty. There was no artist of his era who could match his range, his depth, his integrity, or deep vulnerability. That he lived aslong as he did,given alll he went through, is a kind of miracle, and the music he left us is the closest thing to a National Conscience we may ever find, save for the speeches of Dr Martin Luther King Jr. When I need to explain what I see happening in America today, which is a nation turning its backs on its most vulnerable while leaving wealth and privilege untouched, I find myself turning over and over again to songs which Gil Scott Heron wrote thirty and forty years ago